Lag

[Nohbodie]

Yeah I live out in the middle of like nowhere so I get lag all the time. But sometimes it's sweet 'cause when I'm playing Bad Company I cna like lag through walls. But I usually lag to hardcore I can kill a guy like 8 different ways and then just get killed by him in the end >_>

 

[TomNook]

Lag. Latency. Delay. Ping.

In this day and age, where broadband is readily available to the masses, gaming servers are more able to handle the stress of hundreds of thousands of gamers, systems are tweaked for heady frame rates and multi-layered texturing - it all takes a bit of drive.

That said, it's taken as granted these days that everything runs smoothly. Normally, this would run on system specs of your PC or console, but then you also have to factor in local bandwidth and server capacity for online gaming. This all runs in the background.

So why is lag a number one complaint, up there with griefers and bugs?

We are all human, and lag is an incredibly frustrating experience for everyone involved. Sneaking up on someone for the knife kill just to see them walking into a wall and then kill you without you ever even seeing them move is somewhat unfair..

I for one curse American servers. The most prolific example of this for me is Halo 3 due to game style. In my experience most American players enjoy a split second advantage in most of their actions online; this invariably means the difference between life or death when death is a melee punch away. My connection isn't top notch, but at the same time it's not a 56k. 2.2Mb connections should be plenty good enough for any one game at any one time, in my opinion.

So what part of this complaint do I have wrong? If I was entirely correct the issue would have been addressed a long time ago, faith ensuing. And what can we do, technologically and programming-wise to combat this game killing affliction that is latency?

For me, lag has killed far too many good gaming experiences for me. I have, in the past, abandoned brilliantly conceived games due to not being able to see my opponent. UT, Halo.. I'm sure you can add plenty more.

So you're blaming the US for your lag? Thats just taking this whole slander the US thing a bit too far.

 

[Anarchemitis]

I can't play Team Fortress very well, but that's because my internet sucks, not lag.
I've never had consistent 50 ping before. It's always over 150.

 

[Nohbodie]

I feel your pain, man T_T

 

[Aurora219]

Don't take what I said wrong. I'm not blaming the Americans for being American. I just am fully aware of the fact that people closer to the server are at a slight advantage. My question is why can't we default to having servers all over the world, rather than just the East Coast?

Also, I am interested in your analogy of your hose, Rogue Wolf. You have to appreciate that this part of latency, the base level of lag, is usually only about 10ms at the worst. Electricity moves a little faster than water!

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

10ms? Honestly, if that's the most difference in latency you see from being across the Atlantic ocean from the server, you're extraordinarily lucky. I play World of Warcraft. I live on the East Coast, but primarily play on a West Coast server, and see pings typically in the 250ms range. People who live on the West Coast, with comparable Internet service to mine, usually see 70-80ms pings. That's one-third of mine. Granted, it's an MMORPG and therefore split-second timing isn't nearly as crucial. While electricity is indeed quite a bit faster than water, remember how many computers (and how many different routes) your data is going across on the Internet. It's less "a very long fire hose" and more "a few fire hoses, some garden hoses, a rusty faucet in Berkshire and maybe a drinking straw or two".

My question to you is: Why are you playing on American East Coast servers? Do you not have access to games hosted in England? (I suppose this is one reason why I prefer PC gaming to console gaming; it's much easier to put up a dedicated host for most PC multiplayer games.)

 

[Drednought1]

Lag will get you killed, thats just the way it goes.
Unfortunately for me, my IP is opposed to giving me a working full speed broadband and i regularly find myself having stupidly high pings somewhere in the region of 100 and then some.

 

[Uncompetative]

My connection isn't top notch, but at the same time it's not a 56k. 2.2Mb connections should be plenty good enough for any one game at any one time, in my opinion.

Bandwidth, in most cases, has next to nothing to do with latency. I will use an analogy I read elsewhere that best describes the situation.

Imagine that you have a half-mile-long fire hose. Downloading a large file over a broadband connection is like turning on the water full-blast. It might take the water a second or so to get to your end, but once it gets there you've got a full stream to handle.

Now, think of Internet gaming as if you and a friend were at opposite ends of this hose, and trading messages by writing them on ping-pong balls and rolling them back and forth through the hose. Obviously, there is going to be a lot more time involved in this form of communication than if the fire hose were only two feet long. And in this case, it doesn't matter if the fire hose is a foot wide or barely bigger than a ping-pong ball- the total time of transmission stays exactly the same.

In a basic way, the Internet really is a series of tubes- it is nothing more than a large number of computers all communicating through wires. The more computers and wires inbetween you and the computer you want to talk to, the longer it will take for a message (packet) to get there and back again. You're complaining that you (a gamer in England) have higher latency while playing on an American server than American players do; are you surprised? Your data has to cross three thousand miles (that's a little over 4800 km for you metric folks) of wire just to get to our shores- and that's assuming that the server you want to play on is on the East Coast. Heaven forbid you want to play on a server located in, say, California, because that's ANOTHER 3000 miles of wires and computers (each and every one of differing quality) you'd have to go through. It's like complaining that it would take longer for your postcard to get to my family in New Jersey than it would for mine to get there.

I see by your profile's birthdate that you're twenty years old. You may not have been into online gaming back in the days before multiplayer games could manage things such as client prediction. Trust me, it was a LOT worse back then. The games we play, and the Internet itself, have made strides to cut down on and compensate for latency, but until the laws of physics- or the very nature of the Internet- change... well, let's just say my family in New Jersey is going to hear from me a lot faster than you.

Good explanation, but no suggested solution.

Xbox LIVE could have an extra optional preference, which if enabled would only allow you to join players in the same territory.

So, European players who used this would never get to play Americans. However, I think this would require an extra investment in infrastructure by Microsoft as I think there is only one Xbox LIVE distributed server in America, rather than one per territory.